CURRENT WORKS

Through using my family’s 8mm film archive as my source of information, I am exploring the presence that lost relationships have within a given space. The film that I am appropriating was filmed by and of my paternal extended family in the 60’s in various locations throughout Florida. The relationship between myself and these people is distant and forgotten, yet our shared environment that we call home remains the same.

I am altering this film by enlarging the area in-between its sprocket holes where the image bleeds out of the frame. These spaces are “leftovers” of the still image and have become abstracted and warped over time due to the film’s age and production. These moments expose the aura that gets left behind in a landscape, while also acting as a metaphor for the space continuing to live in it’s own time, despite being forgotten.

Artist Statement

How can one preserve something that is not there anymore, or never was? How is it possible to retain the memory of something that has vanished or was made to vanish? What if this feeling still exists somewhere out there, but is constantly overlooked? My work is an investigation of the area between the tangible and ethereal. I am interested in how the incomprehensible is understood in terms of rendering the invisible visible. How we perceive or fail to perceive things in their natural context opens a space to experience the beauty in everything. This is where the act of seeing begins—this is my attempt at remembering the once familiar.

Biography

Julia Clouser (b. 1992 Clearwater, Florida) is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice includes photography, text, fabric, and video. She received her BFA in Fine Art Photography from the Corcoran College of Art + Design and is currently in her second year in the Mount Royal School of Multidisciplinary Art MFA at Maryland Institute College of Art. Clouser's work has shown in Baltimore, MD and Washington, DC. She also has work in Transformer’s FlatFile collection in Washington, DC. Clouser currently lives and works in Baltimore, MD.